Bialy points out, “We all have tens of thousands of retroviruses in our germline and yet none of them has ever been demonstrated to be pathogenic.”
Bialy told Celia Farber that Gallo, Dr. Fauci, and the thousands of researchers that Dr. Fauci funded to develop ways to kill HIV have never explained how Montagnier’s virus could possibly be responsible for all the harms and diseases attributed to it: “It would have been the major single explanation that [Gallo’s] hypothesis would have had to provide in order to be taken seriously. How do you account for the pathogenicity of this sleepy virus that has not a single pathogenic relative and in fact has 98,000 relatives quietly residing in the human germline? Fuck. 98,000 in the germline! Not in your body cells! In your ovaries! Getting passed on from generation to generation for as long as human beings have been on this goddamn planet. Every single one of them is clearly not only not pathogenic but totally harmless. This is the most powerful proof that what Peter has been saying for twenty years now is absolutely correct.”
Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis expressed his astonishment at the credulousness of the scientific community. For him, it defied common sense that, after hundreds of years of scientific research, one medical scientist, Bob Gallo, had suddenly discovered the true cause of thirty ancient diseases in the United States and Europe, and a retinue of at least thirty more in Africa, and traced them all to a simple creature with a hundred thousand relations, none of them known to cause any disease. “Things don’t happen that fast in science. You don’t suddenly notice that one new organism is causing every problem. I mean, it was a bizarre thing that happened. It really was. It didn’t really have any precedents in terms of medicine before that. Unless perhaps you could think of the ‘possession by the devil’ stuff, right? In that once you’re possessed by the devil, anything that happens to you? [. . .] So it makes it easier for you to get tuberculosis, and it makes it easier for you to get uterine cancer. It makes it easier for you to get candida albicans. And so all those things can now be called AIDS; why would anybody do that? Why would any reasonable doctor start lumping together various symptoms into one pile and think all this is caused by HIV?”22 Christine Maggiore adds, “We have a test, but it’s not a test for AIDS; and it’s called an HIV test, but it’s not a test for HIV; and we have a series of problems that we are calling AIDS, but that doesn’t elevate AIDS into a disease.”23
Thirty years later, many, if not most, virologists have come to grudgingly accept— in some part, at least—Duesberg’s skepticism of the Gallo/Fauci claim that HIV, alone, could cause AIDS. Most research scientists now—quietly—assume that AIDS must have a multifactorial etiology. Significantly, Dr. Robert Gallo and Dr. Luc Montagnier have placed themselves in this cohort. Dr. Tony Fauci is one of the few exceptions.
Other respected scientists took Duesberg’s doubts even further than Duesberg. Led by Dr. Eleni Papadopulos and Dr. Val Turner, The Perth Group in Australia argues that Gallo’s claim was altogether specious and that neither Gallo nor Montagnier had ever succeeded in even isolating a discrete HIV.
In my conversations with Turner and Papadopulos, and in my reading of their paper, I find their arguments clear and convincing. However, I recognize that there are some fifty thousand articles on AIDS in the scientific literature. A casual novitiate like myself has little chance of unraveling this baroque controversy in a vacuum. Without rigorous debate, the public and press must form opinions based upon appeals to authority—a feature of religion, not of democracy or science. Any debate on that battleground will always be won by self-interested government and industry officials who control the bullhorn and the media.
Rather than airing and openly debating such critiques, Tony Fauci and his PI army moved actively and effectively to snuff out the careers and silence the arguments of any scientist or journalist who questioned the official canons of the new state theology.
Punishing Duesberg
On their face, Duesberg’s incendiary queries seemed to create an irresistible bulwark against Dr. Fauci’s HIV-only hypothesis. Even today, Duesberg’s rationales appear so clean, so elegantly crafted, and so compelling that, in reading them, it seems impossible that the entire hypothesis did not instantly collapse under the smothering weight of relentless logic. The scientific world waited to see how Drs. Gallo and Fauci could possibly answer Duesberg’s devastating questions.
But the AIDS cartel never attempted a reply. Instead, Dr. Fauci met this existential assault by simply ignoring it and by castigating anyone who credited it. He set about making Duesberg an example to discourage future inquiries. Dr. Fauci made sure that, in Bialy’s words, the article had “disastrous professional consequences” for Duesberg and “sealed his scientific fate for a dozen years.”24 Dr. Fauci orchestrated a fusillade of withering and venomous attacks that effectively ended Duesberg’s illustrious career.
Dr. Fauci summoned the entire upper clergy of his HIV orthodoxy—and all of its lower acolytes and altar boys—to unleash a storm of fierce retribution on the Berkeley virologist and his followers. The dispute became one of the most sensational, vicious, and personalized battles in the history of science. Dr. Fauci had a strong stake in the controversy. Blaming AIDS on a virus was the gambit that allowed NIAID to claim the jurisdiction—and cash flow—away from NCI. Dr. Fauci’s career depended on the universal belief that HIV alone causes AIDS. The dispute, for him, was existential. Led by Dr. Fauci’s college of cardinals, the medical cartel—the emerging highly profitable drug, research, testing and nonprofit charitable HIV-AIDS enterprise—attacked Duesberg and the other dissidents as “flat-earthers”25 and Holocaust-type “denialists,”26 or, in Dr. Fauci’s estimation, murderers.27 The AIDS establishment, down to its lowliest doctor, publicly reviled Duesberg, NIH defunded him, and academia ostracized and exiled the brilliant Berkeley professor. The scientific press all but banished him. He became radioactive.